Abstract
Sergei Prozorov’s two-volume magnum opus, Void Universalism, is one of those works that appear on the intellectual firmament with the distinctive purpose not simply to cause a stir, but rather to trigger a revolution in the way we approach and theorise world politics. The fact that Prozorov’s project has not yet generated the debate that it deserves is revealing not only of the nature of disciplinary hierarchies, even within critical circles, but also of the philosophical poverty (with some exceptions, of course) that characterises meta-theoretical debates in the field. 1 Void Universalism bears the potential to change all this and set us on an ambitious track to address urgent issues surrounding the interpretation of pluralism in a global era. Indeed, its expressed goal is to challenge us to reconceptualise world politics from the perspective of an ontology of the void that its author synthesises from the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière and, above all, Alain Badiou, 2 who casts his shadow over the entire project.
The turn to ontology in International Relations (IR) is not a new phenomenon but it is, nevertheless, relatively recent. The investigation of the nature of the international and the essence of politics originated in a dissatisfaction with the narrow way international politics was theorised in mainstream circles. Critical thinkers with a philosophical mindset such as R.B.J. Walker, Jens Bartelson, Alexander Wendt, Nicholas Onuf, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Colin Wight (among others) 3 have over the last 25 years offered us sustained engagements with meta-theoretical issues pertaining to an interrogation of the ontological and epistemological foundations of world politics. They do not always agree with each other on the definition, scope, meaning and usage of the word ‘ontology’ but they all recognise that such an exploration is almost unavoidable in our current late- or post-modern predicament characterised by the crisis of foundationalism and the challenge raised by the ensuing nihilism. Meta-theoretical concerns, then, for them is not merely an innocent scholastic diversion but a serious affair with direct ethico-political implications on how we conduct ourselves as researchers and active citizens in a pluralist world that entertains manifold conceptions of truth and continues to resist our attempts to capture its ‘essence’.
Situated within this pluralist mood but critical of its relativistic tendencies, Prozorov’s first volume, Ontology and World Politics, hammers out a version of universalism arguably immune to what Nietzsche would describe as the twin temptations of imperfect and passive nihilism, and the relativism that stems from those perspectives. Indeed, in this volume, Prozorov is anxious to save a vision of universalism that would equally deflect the danger of reducing universalism to another hegemonic particularity, already compromised by its partiality, as well as its mirror image, i.e. the temptation to concede the impossibility of reaching a universal and, thus, capitulating to the absolute relativity of truth. The immense intellectual contribution of this conceptually dense volume is that it manages to make a convincing argument about world politics as the void. This is a bold move as it cuts through conventional understandings of the dimension of world politics as the actual set of all possible world-sets. For Prozorov, this latter conception of universality in both its idealist and realist versions would condemn any search for universals to a double bind. 4 Universalism is either taken to be a regulative idea always approximated but never realised (universalism as ontologically inaccessible) or, conversely, it is reduced to a covert hegemonic claim to power, a hidden ideology of the powerful that manipulate its spectral status (universalism as ontically non-existent). Both versions rely on an understanding of the world as the totality of existing sets of particular worlds. In other words, both idealism and realism end up reproducing universalism as impossibility because they entertain a conception of the world as closed totality.
Engaging with Heidegger’s fundamental ontology that informs the work of the philosophers he draws on, such as Nancy, Badiou and Agamben, Prozorov builds on the Heideggerian distinction between the ontological and the ontic to propose an alternative conception of world politics as nothingness, i.e. the necessarily non-existent ‘object’ that makes objects in the ontic world of politics possible. Prozorov borrows from Badiou’s set-theoretical ontology, ‘because it deals with being qua being and not any particular classes of beings’. 5 In a rehash of Russell’s paradox, Prozorov explains that a conception of the world as the set of all sets would necessarily include all things and their negation, including the nonexistence of itself, resulting in a power set that is far greater than the original: ‘Since every world is a world of worlds, the international world may of course contain an infinite multiplicity of worlds, but the only thing that this or any other world cannot contain is everything’. 6 Prozorov argues, instead, for the World as nothing, a void set that represents absolute potentiality or else the quasi-transcendental (non-)ground that is the condition of possibility for anything existing in the ontic world. The latter is rendered by necessity not-all there is, that is, necessarily incomplete. Not because its entirety is inaccessible or potentially infinite but because totality as infinity has no being.
The argument here becomes apparently complex, yet intriguingly insightful. If the impossibility of an ultimate universal as the set of all sets were not necessary but contingent, i.e. ontologically possible but cognitively inaccessible, then one would be left with a position of agnostic relativism that acknowledges the empirical fact of pluralism and the ungroundability of an absolute universalism, but one could not disparage the possibility of a non-contingent (that is, absolute) universal. Prozorov, instead, foregrounds that the social field exceeds totalisation, not because of its ontic multiplicity, but because it is structured around a fundamental (not foundational) lack, a nothingness, what he calls the World that is generative of multiple worlds and allows the play of differences in the ontic realm. His Badiouian prejudices, however, prevent him from going down the Laclauian route where empty signifiers constitute the formal framing of the political, yet hold no axiomatic content. 7 In contrast, having set the terms of his transcendental ontology, Prozorov makes a precarious move that threatens to unravel his careful distinctions. It is his attempt to derive universal axiomatic political principles that would overcome the nihilism ensuing from an understanding of the void as the condition of possibility for any politics. Mindful of the anxiety generated by the nullification of the World, he seeks to tame the destructive potential that his transcendental analysis opened up by framing and illuminating a politics of the World: ‘a practice of bringing the World into the world by producing its positive intra-worldly effects’. 8 Yet, in a brilliant argumentative move, Prozorov claims that the three axiomatic principles of freedom, equality and community are not distillations of their intra-worldly manifestations held up as regulative ideas but directly accessible in every ontic world as expressions of the facticity of existence (Heidegger again); an existence punctuated by the void of the World, present in its absence in every world. The argument, here, is not an easy target as it takes the discussion forward suggesting a version of axiomatic universalism that is both non-arbitrary and anti-utopian. Politics, even if it exhibits the tendency to go wrong, can always be otherwise, not because of some otherworldly or arbitrary necessity, but because its essence is part of a void ontology lying ‘precisely between the World and worlds’ 9 as their own immanent transcendence.
The second part of the project, Theory of the Political Subject, marks a transition from ontological to phenomenological considerations. Prozorov here offers a defence of the logic of subjectivation in world politics as subtraction (subjective destitution) from all positive determinations. In contradistinction to the Althusserian/Foucauldian thesis of subjectivation as structural effect of immersion in immanent regimes of power and knowledge, Prozorov subscribes to recent post-foundationalist approaches to the subject as the nodal point of the political that he derives from his favourite French philosophers. As every good political philosopher, he has to explain why things go wrong in the ontic realm and how we should position ourselves vis-à-vis this failure (does it prompt redemptive action or does it lead to paralysis and despair?). The rest of the second volume offers an analysis of processes of depoliticisation, i.e. practices that deny the axiomatic universalist logic of politics in two main ways: either by instantiating the axioms of the World directly into the ontic terrain (a catastrophic form of ultra-politics that he equates with Nietzsche’s active nihilism) or by effacing the logic of the void from politics through the negation of at least one of its axioms (a form of post-politics that authorises the Schmittian logic of sovereignty as Katechon). Sovereignty, in that scheme, is an act of failed or pseudo-transcendence that arrives at the universal axioms of the World by suppressing them for all others. Sovereign acts carve out a positive world by limiting community, freedom, and equality.
There are many aspects of Prozorov’s two volumes that are worth commending. His sophisticated and profound elaboration of a full-scale political ontology is good news for a discipline plagued by impoverished notions of ontology (although, I suspect, the project’s ambition and intended impact targets a wider audience both in IR and political theory). It is only through a sustained, but also critical, engagement with works such as Void Universalism that discussions about the nature and scope of postmodern pluralism may avoid the traps of either liberal ‘repressive tolerance’ or the relativism of postmodern identity politics, or even, go beyond featured meta-theoretical debates that advise us to bracket foundationalist claims exactly because they entertain a very limited understanding of ontology as an ultimate or in the last instance ground. 10 In that spirit, my critical remarks below do not constitute a negation or rejection of Prozorov’s arguments but, hopefully, a useful problematisation that may take the discussion forward. In an authentic act of criticism, one does not seek to oppose the other but, rather, bring out a certain ‘internal contradiction’; in a sense, repeat all that the other is saying but for an entirely different reason. The purpose of this critique is not to detect a crack in an otherwise well-built argument but to interrogate that which in it is more than itself, the excess that its omissions, suppressions or silences generate. As, I assume, Prozorov would agree, the critical act is not in what it is being said but in the ‘cut’ between what is said and in the saying, between the content and its form. In that sense, the critical act constitutes the ‘cut of the cut’, as Walter Benjamin would have it. 11
With these preliminary remarks in place, I wish to probe further into the way Prozorov understands the relationship between the World and worlds and his justification of the possibility of a politics of the World. Prozorov’s argument here passes through a critique of Heideggerian nihilism for allowing the production of positive worldly determinations that deny the fundamental conclusion of the World as void, i.e. the affirmation of the contingency of every positive world insofar as the transcendental order that conditions its appearance has no foundation in being. He believes that such a detached indifference to any content assumed by the phenomenal worlds would lead to a radical pluralism with no possibility of adjudication between different worlds. The three axiomatic principles he foregrounds – freedom, equality and community – gain their legitimacy by the fact that they express no positive determination but exist as an undeniable trace (more or less repressed) in every worldly order because every phenomenal world rests on the void that makes its emergence possible. This is an intuitive proposal that attempts to hit two birds with one stone: endorse the fundamental contingency of every phenomenal world but also stave off the danger of relativistic pluralism that lurks behind the affirmation of radical contingency. And yet, it is exactly in the expression of such an anxiety that Prozorov seems to betray his Badiouian credentials. Although the addition of freedom and community as well as equality to his list of axioms of the World already offers an imaginative recasting of Badiouian politics, Prozorov’s preoccupation with the question of judgment does not sit very well with Badiou’s rejection of the priority of judgement in politics. For Badiou, such a move would constitute a regress to a conception of politics as plurality of opinions under a common norm of pluralism, a regression to an Arendtian or postmodern relativism that he abhors. Instead, Badiou’s radical innovation is a reconceptualisation of politics as a militant subjectivising truth-process that prioritises fidelity to an unnameable Event of politics. 12
Indeed, Prozorov seems to depart from the most radical implications of Badiou’s politics when at the end of the second volume he endorses the possibility of affirming the axioms of the World ‘while refraining from producing its effects’. 13 Prozorov is here consciously trying to shy away from the rigorous and uncompromising Badiouian ethics of the unconditional for which the latter has been heavily criticised. But, interestingly enough, he does not abandon Badiou’s ‘ethicism’ for a version of Machiavellian or tragic politics in which the messiness of the actual world has to be taken into account or for an emphasis on the immanent practical context of the Heideggerian Dasein in which the subject always already finds itself. He rather opts for Agamben’s reworking of Walter Benjamin’s world nihilism. The world of phenomenal politics is always already nullified by the fact that it takes place, not in the background, but through either the affirmation or negation of freedom, equality and community. The emancipatory dimension is always already there, not as perpetually deferrable, but, in a sense, woven into the texture of reality itself predicated on the void of the World. This is indeed an admirable avenue and one that is least reproachable as a cop-out. Although Agamben’s antinomic philosophy and Benjamin’s world nihilism are not always on the same page, both pathways remain true to their firm rejection of the depoliticising effects of the modern discourse of sovereignty and to the possibility of another politics arising from a painstaking engagement with the transimmanent nihil that makes both law and its suspension possible.
And yet, doubts emerge as to what extent Prozorov remains faithful to the operation of the transimmanent difference between the World as void and the worlds of politics. If nothingness arises in that difference, then nothing authorises the production of any content, no matter how axiomatic, prior to its mediation through positive political orders. Both Nancy’s and Rancière’s insistence on that point – which Prozorov criticizes 14 – should not be seen as a betrayal of the politics of the World but as an act of fidelity to the difference between the political (World) and politics (worlds). 15 The attribution of content to the politics of the World is in that sense only a manifestation of an anxiety that tries to protect the fundamental fantasy of emancipatory politics: that is, hide from itself its own inability to face up to the nonexistence and the impossibility of its fantasised object. In this respect, a recourse to Slavoj Žižek and his use of the Lacanian concepts of enjoyment and objet petit a might enable us to account for the differing ways that existing political orders are sustained despite the ever-present possibility of the political which is perhaps the most interesting question: i.e. to examine how an axiomatic politics of the World may not only transcend but also sustain those orders by a process of mourning the lost object of fullness or by failing to recognise that what the process of mourning always helps to dissimulate is a loss of a loss, an object of desire that was never really available to us. 16 Or, in Prozorov’s case, how desire already structures the terrain of his engagement with the axioms of the Void as the fantasised lost object of enjoyment transposed from the ontic to the ontological level. This is not an indictment of the ontological facticity of universal World Politics (pure ontology) but a critique of turning that truth (what Žižek would call the truth of antagonism) into a reified ontological politics.
If, as Prozorov would agree, the political (World) as nullification is only ever presenced in the context of uneven political orders, a natural question arising is how politics uses this asymmetry for its own reproduction. More precisely, given that politics is always produced in the tenuous relationship of contingency and order, it would seem imperative to understand how it incorporates and uses the political, the presencing of openness and contingency, to its advantage. At stake, then, perhaps is not so much whether the political appears within politics – which is inevitable given the ontologically contingent nature of all positive determinations – but how this openness is shaped so as to conform to or challenge an existing order. The dual nature of this process including both openness (the political upon which every transcendental ordering and indexing of society rests) and order (politics as the sedimented form of the political), reveals that politics is conducted not only through marginalising contestation – i.e. essentially negating the contingency of the political – but also through authorising specific types of contestations and experiences of social openness over others. In the latter case, almost imperceptibly, the defence of contingency as the necessary (non-)ground of the political is transposed to the ontic level to become a politics of contingency. In other words, fantasy as the fundamental imaginary construction that teaches us how to desire can also take the form of fidelity to a prescriptive axiomatic politics of the World whose preordained content serves as a prophylactic against the ordeal of the undecidable. To be fair, Prozorov does not claim that these axioms are directly enacted into the social but the fantasmatic logic of desire is still present in his discourse in the form of a content-related politics of the World as the fantasised objet petit a of his pluralism.
The prescriptive weight of his axioms become apparent in his rejection of all politics of reformism or compromise and his designation of all true politics as by definition anarchic and all sovereign politics as murderous. 17 Badiouian ethicism is here more than evident in the form of an implicit slippage from a politics of the Void to a nihilistic political ethics. Despite his exhortation to separate the axiomatic force of his politics of the World from their effects, Prozorov seems to be caught in a bind between an ethical limit to politics and a contentless messianic nihilism that he appears unwilling to embrace. The latter sensibility – the road not taken by Prozorov – is expressed in Benjamin’s logic of the messianic as a contentless operational concept preceding every ontic, historical predication; a relationless relation or, otherwise, an inaccessible nothingness (inaccessible, that is, only from the perspective of history since only the Messiah, for Benjamin, ‘redeems, completes and creates his relation to the Messianic’) 18 that does not constitute a determinate or reflective negation of the historical (that would turn it into another positivity) but performs a paradoxical unworking of all forms of politics that create teleological meanings and seek ultimate foundations. This unworking, in turn, is not a method of nihilism that seeks to devalue and abstractly negate all historical values and ultimate goals (i.e. neither a form of active nihilist ultra-politics nor a passive nihilist meta-politics) but indicates the paradoxical mode of attachment to the messianic as the celebration of the eternal transience (ewige Vergängnis) of everything worldly in happiness. That Prozorov describes such a messianic nihilism of the ‘as not’ (ōs mē) as too disengaged from the world because it appears contentless, is paradoxically an indication of the purism of his own discourse and the Manichaean detachment of his politics of the World from redemption as a real historical possibility. Consequently, rather than improving on the messianic, his call for an ‘actual redemption of the world’ 19 guided by the axioms of the World serves only to accentuate that distance.
Eventually, the crystallisation of that purist chasm in his discourse leaves him no other alternative: quite revealingly, having opened the door to the direct ontologisation of phenomenal politics he is quick to close it behind him by concluding with a call for a politics of restraint and limitations. It is quite odd – to say the least – to witness an intellectual enterprise that rests on Badiou’s pure ontology ending up with what practically amounts to an appeal for realist prudence. That said, Prozorov’s superb synthesis of Heideggerian fundamental ontology and Badiouian pure ontology remains an excellent starting point for a politics of fidelity to political difference. In Lacanian parlance, however, his discourse seems to be still operating under the register of desire. Indeed, perhaps his axiomatic ontology is not melancholic enough as it still seems to cling on to some conjuration of first principles to purge the anxiety caused by the hole in the symbolic order and the ghosts and specters it produces. Traversing the fantasy, however, requires declaring fidelity to the uncanny over-proximity of an object missing (politics of the World) even from the place where it ought to be lacking (Void). Transitioning to the register of the drive insists on this experience of redoubled loss without reciprocity or consolation (as the only consistently nihilist affirmation), constantly encircling the empty place, the void that remains inscrutable and indiscernible but always doing so from the side of a symbolic order bereft of the soothing function of lack and its substitutes or compensations.